The Great Depression (45 page)

Gerald Grattan McGeer, mayor of Vancouver, was in a quandary. He could not –
would
not – appropriate as much as a nickel from the city’s nearly empty coffers to feed the men. A one-time boilermaker, he had just turned forty-seven and was reaching the peak of a career that would carry him to the House of Commons, the Senate, and eventually back again to the art-deco city hall he was then planning to construct some distance from the city centre. He had a florid Irish face with a bulbous Irish nose, and a gift of the blarney to go with it. His eccentric ideas on monetary policy attracted few converts, but as an activist mayor he was popular. He wanted the strikers out of his city and back in the camps until the situation could be resolved by Ottawa. He wanted it done as quickly as possible, and he wanted them all out – agitators, union leaders, and deadbeats,
everyone
, blacklisted or not. Only when the city was clear of them, safe from the possibility of riot and bloodshed, could their future be decided.

In this the mayor was supported by Judge MacDonald of the royal commission but not by General Ashton, who felt (no doubt correctly) that such action would only lead to more trouble and another walk-out. Besides, as Ashton said, “strikers would claim they have forced abolition of blacklist.” This admission that there
was
a blacklist – which everybody from the Prime Minister down had denied – and that its abolition would cause the military and the government to lose face, scarcely spoke well for future negotiations.

In mid-April, with hundreds of unemployed men holding snake parades through the larger department stores, the federal government agreed to round up the strikers, weed out agitators,
give all the men a medical inspection, and return them to the camps. That response angered McGeer. Not only would the red tape keep the men in Vancouver for several more days but it would also force the city to pay their room and board while they were being processed.

Now the elegant James Howden MacBrien arrived in town to support the McGeer plan, warning that “serious trouble may arise unless dealt with promptly.” This interference by the head of a civilian police force infuriated McNaughton, who resented the RCMP commissioner’s “giving out a lot of half baked ideas.” He ordered Ashton to tell MacBrien bluntly and firmly that there would be no change in the government’s policy. At that MacBrien hit the roof and said he had every right to tender advice.

“Tell him the government is very upset with him,” McNaughton wired to Ashton.

“He spoke as if he didn’t give a damn,” Ashton reported.

“He is in for serious trouble,” McNaughton replied, darkly.

He did not elaborate, but the idea of the Chief of the General Staff delivering a verbal spanking to the Commissioner of the RCMP is an entertaining one. MacBrien, a former CGS himself, had once been McNaughton’s superior; no doubt that had something to do with the charade. Certainly McNaughton felt himself totally in charge, especially with Bennett out of the picture. Having recovered from his heart attack, the Prime Minister had gone off to London, refusing, a bit shakily, to miss the celebration of George V’s Jubilee. McNaughton continued to draft most of the stonewalling replies that Perley was sending to McGeer and Pattullo.

Yet in spite of the General’s firm stand, there
was
a change in government policy. Late in the afternoon of April 19, he and Perley decided to set aside the medical examinations in the interests of getting the men out of Vancouver. This tactic didn’t work. The majority stayed, some through pressure, others out of conviction or bitterness. As Ashton himself reported, the widespread feeling in Vancouver was that the camp system had lasted too long. Something else was wanted, such as “work with wages on construction.”

In retrospect, that seems obvious. On one side was a pool of young men, physically fit and eager to work. On the other was a variety of building projects that had been postponed because of
the Depression but would have to be undertaken sooner or later. Why not take the plunge now? Prices and wages had never been lower, and the government could save the small fortune it was spending on the camps. As McGeer pointed out, “there are now twenty million dollars worth of public works crying to be done in Vancouver,” while in the vicinity “it is estimated that there are at least two hundred million dollars … [worth] waiting to be undertaken.” He was convinced that there was enough work to “completely eliminate at least seventy-five percent of our unemployment troubles and pave the way for a restoration of prosperity.”

But the government refused to borrow from the future to pay for public works. It would have no truck with J.M. Keynes’s mad scheme of deficit financing. Even though the day was only four years away when the nation would be paying tens of thousands of men and women a minimum of $1.30 a day plus board and lodging, to have suggested that it could be done in 1935 was akin to suggesting revolution. The budget must be balanced!

Meanwhile, Vancouver was settling in for six more weeks of demonstrations, rallies, mass meetings, tag days, picnics, and parades. The strikers lived on a day-to-day basis. Evans’s first rally on April 9 had collected an immediate fourteen hundred dollars, enough to feed and house his followers for no more than three days. By April 13, with money running out, he organized a city-wide tag day that saw men with tin cans standing at every major intersection, asking for contributions.

The Strategy Committee had applied for permission for the event three days in advance to leave time for reorganization in case the city council turned it down – as it did. That was a tactical error on the city’s part. The strikers tagged anyway.

Operations were controlled from a central headquarters in the Holden Building on East Hastings Street, where every key intersection was marked on large maps. From there the tin-can teams were sent out on four-hour shifts. Other teams picked up the full cans and replaced them with empties while women volunteers kept track of the incoming funds on blackboards. Flying squads stood by to replace tin canners who were arrested.

The tin canners covered an enormous territory, from Point Grey to New Westminster. In the latter city, the police chief began making arrests only to find that the men he apprehended
were quickly replaced by others. “I’ll have no bums tagging in this town,” the chief declared.

“Oh yes you will, chief,” replied the head of the flying squad. “There’s a hundred men on the way. How many hundreds can you accommodate in here, chief?”

The police were defeated. “Turn every damned one out,” the chief ordered the jailer, and the tagging continued.

Late that afternoon, the girls counting the nickels and dimes reported that the four-thousand-dollar mark had been passed.

“Comrades,” said Evans, “that’s a lot of dough. We must have protection.… We could be held up.”

With a straight face, he called the Vancouver chief of police, Col. W.W. Foster, and asked for police protection. A short time later two stolid constables arrived and stood guard over the money as it continued to come in.

“Moscow gold!” cried Evans to the police. “Moscow gold!”

By the end of the day some fifty-five hundred dollars had been collected and stored safely in the police vault until the banks opened. The tag money could be stretched to maintain the strike for another ten days.

The following week was quiet, marked only by peaceful demonstrations, parades through the Vancouver department stores, and on April 19 a mass rally of ten thousand in the Vancouver Arena. Evans wanted no trouble that would turn public opinion against the walk-out, especially on the eve of Easter. But trouble of some sort was probably inevitable, and it came on April 23 in the Hudson’s Bay Company store at the corner of Granville and Georgia.

Some fourteen hundred men, marching four abreast, packed solidly together, arms linked, weaving from side to side of the street in a “snake parade” that was designed to prevent a police attack, moved west along Hastings, passing Woodward’s and Spencer’s department stores, both of which, alerted by the police, had closed their doors. The parade turned south on Granville, reached Georgia, and encircled the Hotel Vancouver. Here No. 1 Division detached itself and entered the white-columned Hudson’s Bay store.

The men snake-paraded through the aisles as customers and clerks scattered to the mezzanine. Malcolm McLeod, hoisted on
his comrades’ shoulders, made a short speech listing the strikers’ demands and telling the others to hold their positions and occupy the store until those demands were met. A fifteen-minute standoff followed.

Then the deputy chief, Albert Gundy, arrived to try to move them out. Twenty men started to leave. “Hold fast, boys!” the others shouted. When the police tried to take strikers by the arm and lead them out, the men responded by overturning the counters. A glass display case toppled with a crash. Others followed until the aisles were littered with everything from shoes to candy. Before the division finally left the store and formed up on Seymour Street, five thousand dollars’ worth of damage had been done and Evans’s careful attempts to avoid trouble were shattered. Three policemen were sent to hospital with fractured skulls, one constable was permanently crippled, two strikers were in jail, and more would follow.

The strikers marched north to Victory Square on Hastings Street, attempting to overturn a police car on the way. Jamming the entire square, they squatted on the turf in front of the cenotaph. In a dense ring around the perimeter were two hundred RCMP, many on horseback. Hundreds of Vancouver citizens added to the mêlée. Climbing up on the cenotaph were the strike leaders, including both Evans and the eloquent Matt Shaw, and Harold Winch, the lean, intense CCF member of the legislature for East Vancouver and son of Ernest, a CCF founder.

The gathering named a delegation of twelve strikers, led by young Shaw, to meet with the mayor, whose temporary office was also in the nearby Holden Building. They wanted the city to pay for their food and shelter, but McGeer was having none of that. He told the delegation brusquely that Vancouver was bankrupt, that he could do nothing for the strikers, and that he didn’t intend to take orders from anybody.

The members of the delegation left empty-handed, only to be arrested for vagrancy as they stepped out of the building.
^*
A police cordon was thrown around them to hold them until the van arrived to take them to jail. Only Matt Shaw, who had left his camp earlier that year and was living in Vancouver, was
able to show that he had means of support. He returned alone to bring to an angry crowd at Victory Square the news of what had happened.

A few minutes later, the mayor himself arrived – “Jesus Jeremiah McGeer,” as Evans called him – and for the first time since 1912 the Riot Act was read in Vancouver. At that, the divisions formed up and returned to their respective halls.

The mayor went on radio to lambaste the Conservative government, the Communist party, and the CCF for turning the city into a battleground. The men in the camps, he said, “were also assured that the general strike in Vancouver would be the commencement of a revolution that would … change our system of government into one of communist authority and soviet power.” At the same time, Matt Shaw’s organization blanketed the town with twenty-five thousand copies of a pamphlet attacking and caricaturing McGeer. The strikers sold them for a nickel apiece, keeping a penny for themselves to buy tobacco. The vagrancy charges against the eleven members of the mayoral delegation were quietly dropped.

Stalemate
. McGeer continued to demand action from Ottawa and to blame its policy of inaction for the riot. The government continued to insist that maintaining law and order was a provincial responsibility: “… the Dominion cannot under our constitution intervene,” Perley replied. But the Dominion could act, if it really wished to, as the events leading up to the riot in Regina in July were to prove.

The strikers still had the public on their side, as even McGeer admitted. The Parent-Teachers’ Federation, the Lord’s Day Alliance, and three of the larger United churches all backed them. The CCF, led by its women members, organized the most impressive parade Vancouver had ever seen, complete with floats and pipe band. By the time it reached Stanley Park, 14,000 spectators were on hand to greet it. On May Day another parade of 7,500 marchers was led by 900 high school students. On Mother’s Day, 300 members of the Mothers’ Council led 1,400 strikers to Stanley Park and formed a gigantic heart to encircle them.

But when McGeer again urged Ottawa to provide work for the idle men, Perley made the astonishing reply that “a work and wages policy … might result in retarding the gradual but steady revival of business.”

By May 18, the strikers were again running out of funds, and Evans realized that a new kind of demonstration was needed to maintain momentum. People could easily become bored with the old tactics; something different was required. He hit upon the idea of occupying a public building, and the best choice was the public library and museum at the corner of Hastings and Main in the heart of the East End.

In order to achieve surprise, the planners kept the rank and file in the dark. Two divisions were dispatched to Woodward’s and Spencer’s department stores as a diversion, while No. 3 Division marched from the Ukrainian Labour Temple to the library. Only when they had entered the front door and climbed the spiral staircase to the museum on the top floor did the strikers understand what was planned.

Evans had chosen well, for the building was ideally suited for a siege. The museum was all alcoves and angles, its corners crowded with exhibits and artifacts. The sole staircase that led to it was so narrow and twisting that only one man could negotiate it at a time. The entrance could be closed with a sliding steel grill. It would be difficult to dislodge the strikers, and Colonel Foster, the police chief, had no immediate intention of trying. Foster was the direct opposite of Toronto’s Denny Draper in temperament. A Great War hero too, with a long militia service, his policy in Vancouver that turbulent spring was one of dignity and restraint. The strikers, for their part, were scrupulous about maintaining discipline and preventing damage.